Holy Crap. 3 years since I last wrote here.

I’ve been rather busy doing interesting things professionally, while trying to also tackle a lot personally. I thought after COVID and finishing a Master’s degree, writing here and hobby projects would flow easily. Despite a lot of encouragement from my partner, I’ve struggled to find the energy to enjoy tech.

It took some serious and prolonged effort from my partner hitting me over the head for me to realize that despite working at a “good” company: I need to find some creative outlet and enjoyment outside. Working professionally as a SWE, I’m not certain what that REALLY looks like – but I do know, writing about tech was always a massive part of the “hobby.” The passion for the hobby was in my playing with the FOSS community. Something that largely died during a tough time in my personal life as I entered the professional world 20 years ago.

Sadly, when trying to dip back into the FOSS community, I’ve discovered that the “spark” seems to be missing. In so many ways, Linux and FOSS have been
victims of its own success. Projects are not kind to volunteers wanting to come in as deadlines and profit have become the primary drivers of Linux software. Contributing a patch to GNOME felt a lot easier in 2001 than now. As a young university student, I found so much collaborative energy and encouragement when I pushed half-baked patches. Now, there’s what feels like an infinitely high bar even as a seasoned professional. I read press releases from RedHat executives clearly devoid of any passion for Free Software or people that just want to do “tech for tech sake.”

The key drivers of the old FOSS community were the random developer blogs and contacts. I can’t help but think there are at least a few other FOSS-raised engineers out feeling the loss of community. Just know, you’re not alone. I suspect a big theme of this blog will be trying to find and rekindle something of the positives of the old FOSS community as I work and tinker on new projects myself. I don’t believe such things can be recreated, but maybe, something new and welcoming can form if enough of us try. I can see a couple of my personal projects being good subjects here: some OS development, HAM radio hacking, or maybe just Python hacking - but moreso, I’m hoping I can find and talk about other hackers out there doing cool things. Fingers crossed.

In my last post, I noted that I was switching away from Wordpress to a roll-my-own-solution. I took the last handful of posts, and started the work of converting posts to the new blog format. I never realized until I started converting, that this blog has existed for well over 20 years at this point.

The world of open source is dramatically different today. Sometimes I get a bug up my rear to go take a look at projects I used to work on or people I used to work with. I’ve been in the corporate world so long that each time I come back to the land of open source, I’m amazed by the change that happens over what seems like few years. The initial focus of this blog was on my attempted development of a new Linux distribution. This turned into being a package maintainer for the upstream of Foresight Linux. It’s hard to believe that Foresight itself died roughly 8 years ago.

Maybe getting older introduces nostalgia for the “Good Old Days”, but I honestly miss the open source world that existed in the late 90s / early 2000s. Mostly, Software Development just felt… a lot more fun. I thought for a while that maybe I just made the mistake of turning a hobby into a career. But lately, I think it’s simply tech gentrification. The tech stack of today is infinitely less democratic. The major Linux developers are big corporations: RedHat, IBM, Canonical, Microsoft…

A lot of old-school nerds shouted at the air when SystemD became a “thing”. I never quite drank the hateraid. But, I have come to notice that the core Linux subsystems have gone further and further away from the general Unix hacker philosophy. I don’t think younger students have many open areas for development now. Low level kernel development operates like a large company. Higher level development is typified by the sad state of Wayland Window Managers versus X11 Window Managers.

I can hear someone responding about how “we’re no longer duplicating effort”. This makes the massive assumption that the incoming level of effort remains constant. My opinion? The story of “volunteers” building Linux is dead. The most vocal “community activists” are giving presentations at conferences on new software intended for AWS and Azure while using an Apple laptop.

Yikes. I need to chill before going full cynic.

In any case, I’m slowly working at updating this blog with the past 20 years of converted files. I’m starting at the beginning (and the end) and working my way forward. So, you’ll likely (until I’m done) notice a huge jump in tone and time. Enjoy the time capsule. While I started doing this with my own software, I discovered a new - and very solid - project that worked almost EXACTLY like what I developed. Sans that they actually wrote a markdown processor, allowing them to avoid sideloaded files… So, these entries are now populated using “Hugo”. Unfortunately, that also means no comments. Want to argue? Shoot me an email. I’m hoping to setup Mastadon or Matrix here soon.

Until next time. Peace.

Fighting blog software is tiring.

After some serious consideration, I’ve decided to roll my own software for this site. Why? Wordpress is a fairly massive security liability, and I’d like to avoid the ongoing maintenance effort (or cost of hosted service). Worse, I’ve found that each new version focusing more on being a full-fledged CMS and less on simple blogging. And - yet worse - I’d like to nuke MySQL / MariaDB as a “thing” on this server.

My original blog was a simple M4 macro and Makefile for a static site. This removed the ability to have comments, but at the time, I was utilizing a static hosting service anyway (no databases!). Management was really darn easy in this case, outside of the gnarly aspect of updates.

Eventually, I’d like to introduce a new/custom BBS style piece of software to run this site - complete with comments, mailbox, and user features. Right now though, I have scant time to actually maintain this thing, and I’d like to “simplify” my tech life management into something that’s easy to work with. The original blog will remain available for some time under the /blog directory (to maintain links) - while I work on conversion.

If you’re curious to see the (REALLY HACKY!) software stack used for this blog, I’m hosting it on github. Blog entries are simple markdown file with a side-load JSON file to specify all the meta data. A compile python script scans for files, builds an indexes, and poops out some static HTML.

Boom. Done. Simple is better.